The step toward political and economic theory is already presaged in the distinction between the different and varyingly free forms of striving for something that the individual judges to be good for himself. A wholly different justification of the need to organize human activity in forms of political community arises from this as compared to those advanced in the great modern political theories and, above all, in those beginning with Hobbes. Our attention will initially be focused on this distinct starting point.

The State as the Condition of Possibility for Realizing Freedom and Individuality

In spite of all their differences in individual details, most early modern and modern conceptions of the state share an assumption whose source must be sought not in Plato but in the reception of Hellenistic-Roman conceptions of the state. This is the assumption that the sovereign freedom of every individual is the basic principle of the state and that the state is the specific organizational form that is necessary to ensure that the many individual sovereigns do not reciprocally interfere or indeed destroy each other, and instead are able to live together in a state of optimal practical fulfillment of their freedom.

These basic assumptions cannot be found in Plato or, at most, in highly qualified form. According to Plato, man is born free and is potentially meant to be free, but is neither free and sovereign in himself nor has he always been so. Freedom of the individual is not a given that the state must take into consideration and which it must preserve as far as possible through appropriate measures.